IMO Kei is excellent clay courter or may be just enough talented oust Dull on Clay Bo5 but it's all depends upon his fitness.

This is vacuum era which consists of 0 promising youngsters ( I believe Kei is promising but Dimi, Raonic are vastly overrated. ) Overall depth of competition, level of play is at worst level ( Look Dull's victories this year ) on every surface.

About clay competition if Nadal had Kuerten instead of Federer he would be sitting o. 4-5 RGs, Clay courter like Brugera may have done more damage than 5 yr older Federer on clay.

clay is about grinding and federer can't grind, player with moderate 2 hander and grinding abilities combined with athletic abilities have more chance to defeat Dull on clay than Federer matter how much talented Federer is.

Dulls entire competition has 1 RG combined with major rival a focusing on hard/grass court season ( 8 months Tennis ), While Dull is clay court bully ( Not greatest ) focuses on 5 tournaments on clay. If they were bully like him I am sure Djokovic would have mauled Dull in every tournaments on clay ( He'll do that tomorrow ) since 2011 but they are versatile players, clay field needs bully and for last decade there is only one and he's luckiest player ever.

Against JesusFed anyone would look fairly average. Djokovic would have been destroyed even worse had he (Djokovic) faced Roger in that semi-final.
And no, he (Murray) is not overrated. He's technically a better grass player than Djokovic is. Those three titles the Serb give him statistics on the surface than he does, considering he plays the same damn way he does on clay and still wins the title. Slow as fuck grass does that. It's the same for Nadal during 2006-11.

I don't like to be involved in endless era debates, because here on MTF, the "weak era" argument is very often used without any proofs only to diminish some player's successes.

But when I am looking back to history I have to say that the competition level this year is very weak, one of the weakest. And it's not only about clay, it's overall. All the big four players are declining and I am not going to maditate about the reasons - it's definitely about the age, runnning out of the gas, some family issues, maybe some minor injuries and whatever else and so on. But the worse thing is that (using the famous MTF cliche) any new generation cannot be found. All right, there's Raonic, Dimitrov or Nishikori, but I really don't know what to think about them... It wasn't so long ago when young guns like Safin or Hewitt challenged Sampras and Agassi, but it was a little different situation, because when you watched Agassi - Hewitt match you could see the difference between the attitudes. Hewitt was able to run after every ball, while Agassi with much worse fitness tried to produce attacking tennis trying to tire the opponent. But now, when I am watching for example Federer-Dimitrov match, it seems to me like Federer has much more left in the tank, he seems to be better in terms of fitness...and overall, many of those "old" players, like Ferrer or Youzhny....or just look at the old Haas... have so much stamina to tire young players.

The result is that despite their decline Nadal or Federer are still winning matches over young guns.

This level of competition reminds me 1998, when Sampras was clearly far from his best, Agassi was nowhere, famous Korda won the Australian Open, there were at least 40 favorites to win RG, Greg Rusedski reached 4th place in rankings, hardcourt legend Carlos Moya challenged another hardcourt legend Alex Corretja in the Masters Finals and Sampras managed to stay at no.1 with maybe half of current Nadal's points.

These are just my thoughts written very quickly, hope it's clear what I wanted to write...